This case study in the literary, psychoanalytic, and theological encounters between diasporic Muslim intellectuals and secular western modernity focuses on the simultaneous search for the possibility of both a reformation of Islamic fundamentalism and a transformation of the exclusionary limitations of western public institutions. With roots in original research in the fields of comparative religion and cultural studies, and drawing on sources in English, French, and Arabic, the author introduces and elaborates on the concept of "Western-Islamic public sphere." This concept defines what is at stake in the formative play of public representations where traditionalist foundations and modernist adaptations meet, clash, and produce discourse around their common disequilibrium. The Western-Islamic public sphere (which is secular but not secularist and which is Islamic but not Islamist), within which a critical Islamic intellectual universe can unfold, deals hermeneutically with texts and politically with lived practices. It emerges from within the arc of two alternative, conflicting, yet equally dismissive suspicions defined by a view that critical Islam is the new imperial rhetoric of hegemonic orientalism, and the opposite view that critical Islam is just fundamentalism camouflaged in liberal rhetoric. This innovative and original scholarly apparatus offers a third view-one that arises in its practice from ethical commitment to intellectual engagement, creativity, and imagination as a portal to the open horizons of conflictual history. [Subject: Islamic Studies, Theology, Literary Criticism, Sociology]
Author(s): Dilyana Mincheva
Publisher: Sussex Academic Press
Year: 2016
Language: English
Pages: 179
City: Eastbourne
Front Cover
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Damaged Notions of East and West
Main Concepts
1 The Politics of Critical Islam
The Praxis of Critique
Examples of Religious Heteronomies
Against Heteronomy
Theory and Praxis
The Meaning of Critique
2 Critical Islam inside Academia
Quranic Hermeneutics: The Work of Muhammad Arkoun and Nasr Abu Zayd
The Scholarly Projects of Tariq Ramadan, Malek Chebel and Fethi Benslama
Tariq Ramadan
Malek Chebel
Fethi Benslama
Critical Perspective – Part I
3 North-American Post-Colonial Studies and European Polemics against Islam
The Conundrums of Orientalism: The Reception of Critical Islam in North American Academia
The Tyranny of Guilt – A Counterresponse
Critical Perspective – Part II
4 Literary Voices Turned Political
On the Politics of Literary Texts
Abdelwahab Meddeb’s Public and Literary Project
Critical Reception
Ali Eteraz’s Children of Dust
Children of Dust in the Perspective of the Western-Islamic Public Sphere
Poetics of Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers
Plot and Themes
Maps for Lost Lovers in the Perspective of the Western-Islamic Public Sphere
Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red
Plot and Structure
Politics of the Literary Masterpiece
A Discussion of Divine Heteronomy
Conclusion: Beyond the Damaged Notions of East and West
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Back Cover
